- A member reported being days away from testing a liquid-cooled, 0.45 mm-nozzle polycarbonate 3-D printer hot-end, highlighting continued grassroots experimentation with high-temperature extrusion materials.  
- Discussion of Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and Jython’s ability to sidestep single-core restrictions framed the ongoing debate over language choice for CPU-heavy bioinformatics workloads.  
- A ScienceDaily article (summarized by jrayhawk) was shared, noting that transcription-factor binding sites mutate three times faster than protein-coding genes, underscoring regulatory DNA’s role in recent human evolution.  
- The Kickstarter project “Melon” (a $100 EEG headband claiming to measure “focus”) prompted skepticism about three-electrode consumer EEG devices and speculation on integrating EEG input into Google Glass-style wearables.  
- Participants contrasted the limited signal fidelity of devices like NeuroSky, Emotiv EPOC, and OpenEEG with the marketing hype surrounding “brain-wave” wearables.  
- Golang’s built-in garbage collection was noted as a surprise to some, followed by criticism of its syntax—part of a broader evaluation of languages for concurrent scientific computing.  
- A decade-lapsed exi-chat reader resurfaced, sharing Vinay Gupta’s 2012 “Plausible Utopias” talk (YouTube link provided) as an example of forward-looking futurist discourse.  
- Frustration was voiced over bio-hackerspaces’ reluctance to adopt IRC, attributed to cultural gaps between wet-lab biologists and networked computing communities.